This application is for 5 years of partial support for the meeting "Advances in Nanostructural Genomics" held at annually at The Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine. The primary objective of these meetings is to recruit the interest and participation of researchers from the multiple disciplines that must be brought to bear on solving complex biological problems in this area. Just as the complete gene list will advance the diagnosis and treatment of human genetic disorders, insight into genome structure and function will constitute a solid foundation for understanding the molecular basis of development and disease. Biophysical, chemical and nanoscience approaches to the study of nuclear genome structure and activity have been recently developing and hold considerable promise in this area. A selection of fundamental problems in genome organization and function will be reviewed and discussed in the context of new perspectives and approaches across several disciplines. Advancing these concepts and solving such complex biological problems will require coordinated networks of physicists, chemists and materials scientists collaborating with cell, developmental and genome biologists. In this regard, many of the methodological approaches currently used to approach large-scale nuclear architecture may be highly useful also to study genome structure at the mesoscale and especially at the nanoscale level. This meeting will provide a forum for an interdisciplinary discussion on the short and long-term research goals for correlating genome architecture with biological function. A focused approach connecting biology, nanotechnology, and mathematical modeling is required to make rapid progress in this fundamental and important research area. We anticipate that worldwide leading scientists in the disciplines needed for a comprehensive approach to functional genomics will participate in the discussions. This meeting, first held in October of 2001, has become the springboard for the newly formed "Genome Architecture Consortium", a multidisciplinary core of investigators which has, and will continue to, produce reports identifying the research needs, opportunities, and challenges in determining and understanding the structure of the genome and its relationship to biological function. The 2003 meeting will be held on October 16-19.